Wednesday, February 06, 2013

A ‘celebrity’ Saudi preacher accused of raping and torturing his five-year-old daughter to death has been released from custody after agreeing to pay ‘blood money’.

Fayhan al-Ghamdi had been accused of killing his daughter Lama, who suffered multiple injuries including a crushed skull, broken back, broken ribs, a broken left arm and extensive bruising and burns.

Social workers say she had also been repeatedly raped and burnt.

Fayhan al-Ghamdi admitted using a cane and cables to inflict the injuries after doubting his five-year-old daughter’s virginity, according to the campaign group Women to Drive.

Rather than getting the death penalty or receiving a long sentence for the crime, Fayhan al-Ghamdi served only a few months in jail before a judge ruled the prosecution could only seek ‘blood money’.

Fayhan al-Ghamdi, who regularly appears on television in Saudi Arabia, is said to have agreed to pay £31,000 to Lama’s mother.

The money is considered compensation under Islamic law, although it is only half the amount that would have been paid had Lama been a boy.

But it must be because they're Muslim Arabs, right? White Christians would never do such a thing, right? Well, not exactly. It's actually just wergild, the old tribal system practiced in much Europe all the way through a good chunk of the Christian Middle Ages in which the wealthy could essentially pay fines to the families of victims to absolve them of their crimes. The fines for crimes against lower classes were much less severe than crimes against upper classes. Here's what it looked like in England from the 9th to 11th centuries in cases of rape:

This sort of "law" is prevalent wherever centralized bureaucracies are not in place to keep it in check. This sort of "law" is the natural and inevitable outgrowth of libertarian and anarchist thinking no matter what race or religion is dominant.

And why? Because paying someone off for unspeakable crimes is itself a better solution than generations of blood feuds and violent deaths on the part of people bristling with weapons and angry men absent any sort of overarching authority to put an end to it.

It is, in short, the patriarchal end result of pro-local control, pro-weapons, anti-feminist and anti-statist ideology. Nor is it any wonder that the Scots/Irish Confederate descendants of the same folks who gave us Hatfield McCoy feuds are so eager to return to life without such state encumbrances, and have some of the most backward views in the Western World about the reproductive rights of women. It's not too far a cry from this:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls "convenience." He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother's life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Heaven forbid these people ever take irretrievable grasp of public policy in this country, or that the social supports that allow for civilized intervention against such barbaric thinking ever disappear. And heaven help the people of Saudi Arabia who suffer yet under such impeccable libertarian conservatism.